Public Dialogue: Direct Actions
Strikes, sit-ins, boycotts, blockades, resource redistribution – social movements incite a range of direct actions to achieve justice in our communities.
In this public dialogue, we gathered four direct action practitioners to share hard-earned lessons from multiple fields of struggle: abolitionist and union militancies, Palestine solidarity, aiding asylum seekers, and mutual aid operations.
We examined how direct actions – both material and symbolic, strategic and tactical – are created and adapted in motion to meet changing movement needs. We reflected on how direct action campaigns that include agitation and aftercare can deepen collective trust and sustain courageous risks for longterm transformation.
In this historic moment of upheavals, let’s come together to study our direct actions in order to more effectively spread their impact.
In conversation:
Minahil Akbar is an arts worker and organizer living in Brooklyn on unceded Lenape land who was raised in NYC, with roots in central and south Asia where they were born. Minahil is committed to the liberation of all people from white supremacist capitalist systems of oppression, and believes deeply in building communities of care.
Briana Calderón Navarro is a Mexican-American artist living in NYC for 12 years and co-founder of Collective Focus Resource Hub. Her work primarily consists of free food and clothing distributions in addition to immigrant and native cultural activism, with an emphasis on videography and storytelling.
Lisa Fithian is an anti-racist organizer, direct action trainer and strategist, and author of Shut It Down: Stories from a Fierce Loving Resistance. Since the mid-1970s, Lisa has been working for nonviolent social change, from environmental justice to student and worker rights, from peace and global justice to immigration and housing.
Reverend Juan Carlos Ruiz is a co-founder of South Brooklyn Sanctuary – a grassroots, volunteer-run, legal program to support recently arrived immigrants. He has been a leader in the immigrant sanctuary movement in New York and New Jersey for over twenty years, and believes in the inherent dignity of each person and the power of community to challenge the injustices of the legal system.
